Presence Services: A Look at the Future

1. Presence Services:A Look at the Future Tom Gray Luigi Logrippo Pinetel <digroup_codec@hughes.net> Université du Québec en Outaouais <luigi@uqo.ca> OCRI Partnership Conference Series - Ottawa, 2006-09-21

2. Natural Intelligence This is where we started… These gentle ladies knew a lot about telco services…

3. The old good time… • Please Operator, put me in touch with a heart doctor… may be Dr. Shepp? • Oh, no, she is out of town these days, Dr. Toby replaces her… • Yes, put me in touch with Dr. Toby. • Hhhmm… let’s see… Thursday afternoon he is usually at his office… but at that time he does not want to take calls. Is this urgent? • Yes! • We’ll try the office anyway, if not we’ll try the hospital…

4. Intelligence must be programmed Automation Switches were later automated and we are still trying to recover from that

5. The intelligence to be programmed • Please Operator, put me in touch with a heart doctor… may be Dr. Shepp? • Wishes to contact a role (rather than a device) • Has a preference • She is out of town these days, Dr. Toby replaces her • Presence information • Role replacement information • Thursday afternoon he is usually at his office… but at that time he does not want to take calls • Information acquisition through user observation • Knowledge of user policies • Is this urgent? • Priority information to resolve policy interactions • We’ll try the office anyway, if not we’ll try the hospital • Call forking

6. Aware of Context • Operator should be aware of context of call • And of end user relationships • Should fit call within priorities of these relationships • E.g. should know of doctor location and forward calls there • Note application to enterprise context: • E.g. call for sales or technical specialists • Structural information must be extracted from the organization to fit call handling to organizational needs

7. Technology Changes Needed • Old: calling devices • So, many features had to be created to find roles or people • through space -- call forwarding • through time -- voice mail • New: calling roles or people • On to the future - Pervasive wireless (note WiFi etc.) • people can always be found! • emphasis on filtering and forwarding rather than enabling connectivity

8. Presence and Availability • Presence • how and where someone may be contacted • multiple modalities - voice, email, IM, voice mail, assistant • multiple locations • Availability • openness to interaction via a specific modality

9. New Services • Awareness of user relationships and business context • All calls from my students will have announcement X played out. • During work hours, I am always available for calls from boss • Priority to calls from team colleagues in last week before demo • Location services • Call closest specialist • Call Sue as soon as she arrives in the plant • Call Joe as soon as we are both in the same building • Block calls when I am in meeting room • Don’t call if destination moving more than 20km/hr • Availability services • During lunchtime, secretaries are available for urgent calls only • Notification services • Remind me of the weekly 3 pm meeting if I am not already in the meeting room. • Personal addressing services • If the call is from a person involved in project X, redirect it to the team leader

10. Presence systems • Can we do all this automatically? • A telecom systems engineering problem • Even if users and switch subscribe to different telco software? • A standardization problem

11. System Architecture (Romelia Plesa PhD) Context update Call control context Communication System Context Information Server Policy Server Personal Communication Manager • Close interworking of several systems components • Context acquisition and update • User policies • Call control

12. Context update Call control context Communication System Context Information Server Policy Server Personal Communication Manager The Architecture (Romelia Plesa PhD thesis) Functional Requirements: • collection of context information using sensors • dissemination of context information • publication of presence information from users and their devices • description of user policies and preferences • user preferences-based call processing • interaction detection and resolution • independence of communication protocol • SIP, H.323, other session protocol

13. Context update Call control context Communication System Context Information Server Policy Server Personal Communication Manager The Architecture • Context Information Server updates, stores and distributes the context information. • Policy Server manages the user’s policies. • Personal policiesallow users to establish preferences about how their calls should be handled. • Subscription/ Notification policiesallow users to project different presence to different persons.

14. Presence systems concepts • Presentity: a user • Watcher: another user who is interested in the presentity’s status • Watcher can subscribe to the presentity’s status changes • However Presentity’s subscription policies can limit this • Watcher will receive notifications of Presentity’s status changes • Watcher will have policies to react to such notifications subscribe notify notify presentity watcher

15. Applications: • Formal and informal interactions in environments of various degrees of structuring focussing on high availability • Hospitals • Factories • Banks, financial • Call Centres • Military: Command and Control

16. GUI for prototype system (D.Jiang, Master thesis)

17. GUI for adding policies A policy is composed of the following four parts: type (CPL top action), conditions (CPL switches), one action (CPL action) destination (CPL location). Here user asks that all calls from Stephen be proxied to Sharon’s voicemail

18. Policy management: edit, delete By clicking the account related links “edit” and “delete”, Sharon can edit her personal account and deregister her personal information from the system respectively

19. Presence management: add watcher By clicking the link “add watcher”, the GUI “Add Watcher” pops up allowing the current user Sharon to approve an incoming subscription request from a specified watcher

20. Selective notification to watchers When Sharon updates her phone line status from “off” to “on” in working hours via the GUI “Presence Update”, the result for her presence update event is shown. Stephen is not notified according to Sharon’s policy “NOUT1”. The other watcher (Dongmei), for whom Sharon has no notification policy, is successfully notified in the system default behavior.

21. State of the art • Considerable practical demand for these functionalities • Within the general framework of IMS: • Internet Multimedia Systems • Voice becomes a service fitting into larger enterprise processes • To foster collaborative work • In practice, patchworks of partial solutions are available • However research is well advanced and proposes general, feasible solutions

22. From a recent industrial announcement(one of many) IMS Support: Oracle SPD includes a SIP Application Server, Presence Server, Proxy Registrar and Location for a complete IMS-ready Infrastructure. Oracle acquired the SIP Infrastructure as part of its Hotsip acquisition.

23. Conclusions • Communications systems with advanced enterprise functionalities will be necessary for efficient collaboration in organizations • VoIP makes their realization possible, because of the unlimited programming possibilities • The features we have mentioned, as well as many others that will be invented, are among the key assets of VoIP